Trenchline

A trope in WWII movies/games that always sparks a feeling is, pinned down on the beach, the guy lugging along a bulky radio unit, screaming hopelessly to command, as if somehow there was a reason they put a telephone on Omaha Beach, as if there is anything you can say from the end of the line. The illusion of connection evaporating; you are on your own in metal shrieking.

Trenchline, a WWI/WWII hybrid with names changed to protect the guilty, dwells in the ambiance of this mood, dropping you off right amidst that loneliness: ““Mercenaries make easy money,” your army buddies said. “It’s all scowls and shows of force. It’ll never come to real fighting.” Well, they’re all dead now, and here you are. Stranded deep in a war zone, running from the fascist government, in a country you hadn’t even heard of two months ago.” Alone in a trench, watching “A memory of a forest, slowly being transformed by fascist artillery fire to a barren moonscape”, you scrabble around the rubble to find the pieces to fix the damaged radio to call in artillery support, so you can retreat from the position.

Wandering an emptied setting which is usually hectic with crowds, such as a trench in a war, creates that uncanny ghostliness that fogs over so many IF games, with piecemeal puzzling breaking up the implied reality into a jigsaw puzzle, but Trenchline manages to keep itself grounded through its rigorous focus on a single setpiece puzzle: fixing and working the radio. Salvage some wire, tie it around a tripod, get a signal, search out a page that gives you frequencies and callsigns, figure out how to read it, all these steps keep you hurrying from one task to another as “Your ears are hammered by a sustained rhythm, as if you were inside the drum of an angry god.” The puzzles solidify into the breathless tactility of the trenches, with your link to the outside world as tenuous as those no longer here to work it. Although the puzzles mostly work in this vein, for some reason the tripod seemed to move all around the map once I got it tied to the wire, and having two unrelated wires invited disambiguations that flattened the mood a bit.

Where the game works best is when, operating the radio, you get a chance to play in character. You can’t just start speaking on a military frequency, instead the game insists on protocols: ““>this is u71 over / “This is H43, go ahead U71, over.”” Here you get to meld into the war chatter, navigating a conversation puzzle which, while fairly straightforward to solve, offers many enjoyable deadends. Indeed, if you really get into character, you can elicit some colorful responses: ““H43 this is U71, merc unit devastated by enemy action, request…” / You are interrupted by an infuriatingly bemused voice. “Roger, U71, their attack held the Army’s attention as planned. Now we don’t need to pay the balance! Viva la Revolucion!”” But, if you think like a soldier, call in the artillery support you need, you can feel the machinery of war rumble to your rescue: “““This is U71, enemy artillery fierce, request suppressive fire, over.” / “This is G39, understood, checking fire priorities, break.” The silence is shorter than you would have guessed. “U71 this is G39, priority approved. Triangulating enemy battery location, over.” There is a much longer, pregnant pause on the line before it is finally broken by, “G14 this is G39 shot, over.” / A new voice, labored from exertion blares from the speaker. “This is G14, shot out.” / “Splash, over” / “hooo Splash, out. G39 this is G14, left 300, fire for effect.” / “U71 this is G39, time on target 2 minutes, you got 10 minutes of cover. Good luck U71, out.” / The close air of the bunker becomes charged in the sudden silence from the radio.” Ten minutes? You better start running.

If only to keep pace with Trenchline, which knows what it wants to accomplish and gets there quickly. It doesn’t quite mettle up to a mood as intense as its intent, but nevertheless settles amicably enough in its slyly semiserious style. For what I think is a debut, the author shows a lot of promise and craft, so one can only be thankful for fos1’s efforts to keep TADS vibrant having brought forth fruit like this.

Trench Line is a stealthy/actiony/parsery vignette that takes place on an active battlefield, a setting I’m not at all familiar with, either in life or in games. But it felt very real, both in the sense where a story immerses you in a life-threatening situation and also in the sense where you’re in an escape room being tasked with disarming a bomb when you have no idea how to do that in real life. But even though I needed a nudge to figure out how to use the radio, it was satisfying to get the hang of the protocol and make my way out of danger.

The writing was straightforward yet evocative. Even though it mostly just described the pertinent information for the current moment, it painted a larger picture of what must have happened to lead to this point. The random per-turn events and descriptions of the transitions between rooms added a lot of flavor. Occasional use of bold and italics commanded my attention (at least at first—once I realized the italic events were repeating, I started becoming desensitized to the battlefield, to my benefit, at least for the moment).

The choice to start in the middle of a battle was intense. I felt I had some info about the situation, but not enough to honestly assess my role in the conflict—which is fine. That might not be on the player character’s mind in a situation like this anyway. Especially not one who came here looking for easy money.

If this was the intro of a larger game (or, if not the very beginning, an early stage), I can see myself continuing to play and getting into the story. I’m curious about how I ended up in that place, on that side. But the game works well as a small action game with a modest goal, and it’s not like anything I’ve played before. That’s pretty great for a debut work!

This is a tight, focused game set in the trenches during a war—the first game with that setting I’ve encountered! I will confess that I tend to dislike war fiction (war is horrible; I don’t need stories to remind me), but this piece isn’t actually focused on the horrors; rather, it uses that backdrop to create some neat little puzzles and a compelling reason to solve them.

It’s hard to establish a crisis mood in a parser game, and in this one, while ambient messages every few turns mention the explosions ringing out overhead, their repetitiveness and lack of impact on the gameplay made them fade into the background quickly. But the descriptions of the immediate setting really captured the place, with succinct and evocative images such as:

An unknown liquid has turned the bottom dirt to muck, requiring a haphazard layer of pallets to provide flooring.

>x pallets
The pallets have half-sunk into the mystery muck at the bottom of the trench. It would take heavy pry bars to move them.

These kinds of details really made it feel like this game could be set nowhere else, and while it feels weird to say I enjoyed inhabiting this space, I did like experiencing this unusual IF setting.

I said above the game is tight; I didn’t count the number of rooms, but it was quite low (five or six?), with typically one significant object to find and collect in each. Because the possibility space was so small, some of the time I felt like I was stumbling upon the puzzle solutions ((Spoiler - click to show)“I need to extend the reach of this wire—I guess the tripod must be for that since it’s the only item I have left?”) rather than actually figuring them out. On the other hand, I also turned to the hints twice (for (Spoiler - click to show)tuning the radio and for looking at the back of the code page); having them built-in and context-dependent was much appreciated! And on the third hand, (Spoiler - click to show)making the series of radio calls required to secure my escape was very satisfying.

In all, it’s a well made little game that’s much better than it had to be given its origin as a programming exercise to learn TADS. In my own learning-Inform game, I just made a simulation of a few streets in my neighborhood. This is much more imaginative and fun to play!